Trump Doesn't Buy Into The Climate Religion

Trump Skips Climate Church

By 
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
The Wallstreet Journal
2017 June 2

The business case for the Paris agreement has nothing to do with climate change. It goes like this: It is better to be part of any confab than outside of it. Like saluting the flag or bowing your head in church, there is no cost to being insincere, but there is a cost to not going along.

Let us understand something: 195 countries will not be dragged kicking and screaming to sign any agreement that imposes a cost on them. Such deals exist only because they provide an international imprimatur to what politicians were going to do anyway.

The oil countries like Saudi Arabia and Norway signed. They plan to keep producing oil. India and China plan to grow energy consumption until it is similar to the per capita consumption of the developed countries, at which point it will level off.

The U.S. and Europe intend to keep subsidizing green energy as long as domestic voters give them permission to do so, because the whole point of being in office is to redirect resources to interest groups best able to reward politicians for doling out the goodies.

The Paris countries agreed to meet certain emissions targets, and claimed an intent to hold a planetary temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

Not only are the emission targets unenforceable, they have no intelligible relation to the temperature goal according to the very iffy science. By the shot-in-the-dark estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s even possible the rest of the century will bring little warming anyway.

And that’s good. Because the unenforceable cuts agreed to in Paris would be a rounding error even if carried out.

In the 30 years since global warming became a daily concern of the newspapers, one lesson has been reliably demonstrated for policy participants: There is no appetite in the body politic for the kinds of energy taxes and prohibitions needed to make a meaningful change in atmospheric CO 2.

We won’t dwell on the media hysteria since the Trump decision, or why many of you, dear readers, in defiance of your own reason, will participate in the hysteria even when you know better. Human beings are social animals. When a mob is forming, we experience high anxiety if we’re not part of it.

Agreements like Paris arguably aim at the wrong target anyway. Only when technology can meet mankind’s energy demand at competitive cost will low-carbon energy prevail. Governments would be wise to invest in basic energy research rather than throwing money at energy technologies that are viable only as long as the subsidies keep flowing. But the latter is what brings in the political bacon.

Oh well. Hypocrisy is the universal solvent of social relations. This also explains the other big climate story of the day, which reporters have given themselves hypoxia trying to inflate the significance of. We’re referring to the vote by 62% of Exxon shareholders, led by giant funds Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock, to ask the company to explain how the Paris temperature target would affect its business.

For 30 years there has been push-and-pull in politics over climate change. During every nanosecond of that time, at least while markets were open, investors were repricing energy shares in light of the possibility of climate change legislation.

Exxon has nothing new or useful to tell investors in this regard. Would a carbon tax be good for bad for the company? It would accelerate the displacement of coal by natural gas, which Exxon produces. Is an electric-car battery in the offing that would go 300 miles and be rechargeable in a five-minute stop at a charging station? Probably not. In which case, even a sizable carbon tax would be unlikely to make much dent in the 8% of global emissions caused by passenger cars. Americans bought 143 billion gallons of gas last year when the price was $2.25; they bought 133 billion gallons in 2012 when the price was $3.64.

“Our patience is not infinite,” huffed a statement by BlackRock, the $5.4 trillion Wall Street fund, as it voted for Exxon’s climate penance.

This gesture, of surpassing meaninglessness, is a case of one prominent institution trying to buff up its reputation for church attendance at the expense of another.

And yet, regardless of Mr. Trump’s Paris decision, only one large national economy has been reporting sizable emissions declines, thanks to fracking. The same economy may soon also be able to take credit for slowing China’s prodigious emissions growth thanks to natural gas exports to displace Chinese coal. That country is the U.S. under the unthinkable monster Donald Trump. Whatever evolution toward a lower-carbon energy system takes place in the future, it will also certainly be driven overwhelmingly by technology and markets, not policy.

Appeared in the June 3, 2017, print edition.

Why the Paris Climate Agreement Is Bad for the U.S.

4 Reasons Trump Was Right to Pull Out of the Paris Agreement

Commentary By

Nicolas Loris
Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy

Katie Tubb
Policy Analyst

2017 June 1

President Donald Trump has fulfilled a key campaign pledge, announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

The Paris Agreement, which committed the U.S. to drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, was a truly bad deal—bad for American taxpayers, American energy companies, and every single American who depends on affordable, reliable energy.

It was also bad for the countries that remain in the agreement. Here are four reasons Trump was right to withdraw.

1. The Paris Agreement was costly and ineffective.

The Paris Agreement is highly costly and would do close to nil to address climate change.

If carried out, the energy regulations agreed to in Paris by the Obama administration would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, harm American manufacturing, and destroy $2.5 trillion in gross domestic product by the year 2035.

In withdrawing from the agreement, Trump removed a massive barrier to achieving the 3 percent economic growth rates America is accustomed to.

Simply rolling back the Paris regulations isn’t enough. The Paris Agreement would have extended long beyond the Trump administration, so remaining in the agreement would have kept the U.S. subject to its terms.

Those terms require countries to update their commitments every five years to make them more ambitious, starting in 2020. Staying in the agreement would have prevented the U.S. from backsliding or even maintain the Obama administration’s initial commitment of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent.

The Obama administration made clear in its commitment that these cuts were only incremental, leading up to an eventual 80 percent cut in the future.

In terms of climate benefits produced by Paris, there are practically none.

Even if every country met its commitments—a big “if” considering China has already underreported its carbon dioxide emissions, and there are no repercussions for failing to meet the pledges—the changes in the earth’s temperature would be almost undetectable.

2. The agreement wasted taxpayer money.

In climate negotiations leading up to the Paris conference, participants called for a Green Climate Fund that would collect $100 billion per year by 2020.

The goal of this fund would be to subsidize green energy and pay for other climate adaptation and mitigation programs in poorer nations—and to get buy-in (literally) from those poorer nations for the final Paris Agreement.

The Obama administration ended up shipping $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to this fund without authorization from Congress.

Some of the top recipients of these government-funded climate programs have in the past been some of the most corrupt, which means corrupt governments collect the funds, not those who actually need it.

No amount of transparency negotiated in the Paris Agreement is going to change this.

Free enterprise, the rule of law, and private property are the key ingredients for prosperity. These are the principles that actually will help people in developing countries prepare for and cope with a changing climate and natural disasters, whether or not they are caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

3. Withdrawal is a demonstration of leadership.

The media is making a big to-do about the fact that the only countries not participating in the Paris Agreement are Syria and Nicaragua.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a bad deal. Misery loves company, including North Korea and Iran, who are signatories of the deal.

Some have argued that it is an embarrassment for the U.S. to cede leadership on global warming to countries like China. But to draw a moral equivalency between the U.S. and China on this issue is absurd.

China has serious air quality issues (not from carbon dioxide), and Beijing has repeatedly falsified its coal consumption and air monitoring data, even as it participated in the Paris Agreement. There is no environmental comparison between the U.S. and China.

Other countries have a multitude of security, economic, and diplomatic reasons to work with America to address issues of mutual concern. Withdrawal from the agreement will not change that.

Certainly, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement will be met with consternation from foreign leaders, as was the case when the U.S. withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol.

However, it could very well help future negotiations if other governments know that the U.S. is willing and able to resist diplomatic pressure in order to protect American interests.

4. Withdrawal is good for American energy competitiveness.

Some proponents of the Paris Agreement are saying that withdrawing presents a missed opportunity for energy companies. Others are saying that it doesn’t matter what Trump does because the momentum of green energy is too strong.

Neither argument is a compelling case for remaining in the agreement.

Whether it is conventional fuel companies or renewable ones, the best way for American energy companies to be competitive is to be innovative and competitive in the marketplace, not build their business models around international agreements.

There is nothing about leaving the agreement that prevents Americans from continuing to invest in new energy technologies.

The market for energy is $6 trillion and projected to grow by a third by 2040. Roughly 1.3 billion people do not yet have access to electricity, let alone reliable, affordable energy.

That’s a big market incentive for the private sector to pursue the next energy technology without the aid of taxpayer money.

The U.S. federal government and the international community should stop using other peoples’ money to subsidize energy technologies and while regulating affordable, reliable energy sources out of existence.

The Paris Agreement was the open door for future U.S. administrations to regulate and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on international climate programs, just as the Obama administration did without any input from Congress.

Now, that door has thankfully been shut.

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal